Crime & Law
Inspector General Launches New Dashboard to Track CPD Overtime Spending Amid Budget Crisis
(WTTW News/Michael Izquierdo)
Elected officials and Chicagoans concerned about the amount of money the city is spending to pay members of the Chicago Police Department to work overtime will soon have a new way of keeping track of the cost to taxpayers, the city’s watchdog announced Thursday.
The new database launched after WTTW News reported CPD spent $273.8 million on overtime last year, 6.5% less than in 2023 and but still more than two and a half times the $100 million earmarked for police overtime by the Chicago City Council as part of the city’s 2024 budget, according to data published by the city’s Office of Budget and Management.
In all, the city spent $510.9 million on employee overtime in 2024 — 1.5% less than in 2023, with more than half of the total amount used to compensate CPD officers for working extra hours.
“As the city begins a historically challenging budget process for 2026, we hope that this tool will be of use to Chicagoans, to city officials, and to CPD itself,” Inspector General Deborah Witzburg said in a statement that praised police brass for helping build the new database.
Chicago faces a likely deficit of nearly $1.2 billion in the 2026 spending plan, according to the city’s most recent budget forecast. That projection is scheduled to be updated by the end of August.
CPD accounts for nearly 46% of Chicago’s discretionary spending, records show.
“CPD is the city department which, by a gaping margin, occupies the largest percentage of the city’s budget,” Witzburg said in a statement. “In recent years, CPD’s overtime spending alone has dwarfed the entire budgets of many other city departments.”
In 2024, CPD spent nearly three times as much on overtime than any other city department. Since 2019, the annual amount spent by CPD on overtime has nearly doubled, despite routine pledges from police superintendents and mayors to rein in the spending, which occurs without any oversight by the Chicago City Council.
“Until now, despite high dollar costs and significant interest from the public and from lawmakers, data on CPD overtime has been difficult to access and analyze. With this addition to OIG’s Information Portal, users can pinpoint overtime information for specific ranks, units, and timeframes,” according to the inspector general’s office.
More than 290 city employees earned more than $100,000 in overtime alone, on top of their salaries, according to a WTTW News analysis of the data. Of those city employees, nearly 69% are CPD members.
The Office of the Inspector General also maintains several databases that detail staffing in the Chicago Police Department.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
